I’ve been quiet here lately due to work, preparation for the yearly interactive fiction competition, and Kingdom Hearts. Since I’m not writing anything here, the least I can do is offer an interesting link, even if by “interesting” I mean “something that only Geof and I are likely to care about”. When Physics, Economics, and Reality Collide is a detailed look at what it would take to get cheap orbital access, “cheap” here being defined as $1000 per pound launched into low-Earth orbit.

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I’ve started Kingdom Hearts twice and have not gone very far. With what you’ve played so far, do you think it worth finishing? Work’s been slamming me as well and most of the time I’ve been staring at the TV in the evening.

Is it sad that, about 10% through, I got really angry that they even considered SSTO? SSTO and RLVs just aren’t practical in today’s engineering environment, and I’m not sure that an SSTO is ever practical given the mass fraction involved.

Also, I don’t know that a “many small rockets” approach works at all. It certainly doesn’t for any of the scenarios I see on a daily basis. For an example: getting an ISS battery to orbit? 500 pounds a battery or so. We’re really going to put one battery in a rocket and call that a day? $500,000 for a battery? Yeah, the public’s really gonna love that.

That said, I don’t know what the breakthrough is. Chemical propulsion seems to have been optimized at this point.

[I like reading economics, and I obviously like rockets, but I quit after the first page.]

Not everyone has your religious objections to SSTO, and to not discuss it would be to leave a gaping hole in their analysis that SSTO proponents would then beat on. So, yes, I would put that in the “sad” column.